How a small group of Amazon workers took on big business and challenged traditional unions | Kenan Malik

A documentary about unionising the company's Staten Island warehouse reveals new ways of negotiating with oppressive bosses

The union wants to protect workers. The employer wants to protect workers. How do I choose between them?" So asks one young worker in Union, a documentary about the battle to unionise an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, New York. It is a telling comment on the confusion today about what it means to defend working-class interests and the difficulties in trying to build working-class organisations.

Directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, two of the most engaging and innovatory documentary film-makers today, Union opens with a huge cargo ship piled high with containers, sailing slowly into view. The film then cuts to a line of people, half asleep in the early hours of the morning, waiting to be transported to an Amazon fulfilment centre" - a vast warehouse stuffed full of commodities, both goods and humans. It cuts again to a shot of the Blue Origin rocket carrying Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and a few friends and fellow billionaires into space. It is a visual metaphor for the disparity of power that lies at the heart of the story.